Pankaj Mishra is an Indian essayist, novelist and historian based in the UK.

In 2014, Yale University awarded him the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (valued at $150,000 one of the largest prizes in the world of its kind) in recognition of his far-reaching work.

Pankaj was the Visiting Fellow for 2007–08 at the Department of English, University College, London, UK., and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008.

In November 2012, “Foreign Policy” magazine named him one of the top 100 global thinkers, and in 2015, “Prospect” nominated him to its list of 50 World Thinkers.

His works include Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), as well as From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia (2012).

His latest book Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017) about the transition to modernity and the rise of the right wing as well as how other modern ‘ills’ have had a lively and broad reception globally.

In Age of Anger, Pankaj accounts for the resurgence of reactionary and right-wing political movements in the late 2010s. He argues that nationalist, isolationist, and chauvinist movements, ranging from terror groups such as ISIS to political movements such as Brexit, have emerged in response to the globalization and normalization of Western ideals such as individualism, capitalism, and secularism.

“Now with the victory of Donald Trump,” Mishra writes, “it has become impossible to deny or obscure the great chasm .?.?. between an elite that seizes modernity’s choicest fruits while disdaining older truths and uprooted masses, who, on finding themselves cheated of the same fruits, recoil into cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality.”